Roach crawled inside my ear!

When I was a kid, I was surrounded by roaches and mice. It was so bad that anytime I left my house, I’d shake off all my clothes to make sure there were no critters on me. It happened once or twice that I’d be on the train, and a roach would crawl out of my shirt. That was dreadfully embarrassing. So it should come as no surprise that eventually, a roach went inside my ear.

We discovered this one day when I woke up with excruciating pain in my ear. I was a young kid, and while I can’t remember the pain itself, I remember being taken to the hospital because of it. I think we went to Lebanon Hospital in the Bronx. The doctors examined me to figure out the source of my pain. They used the otoscope to look inside, and one of them seemed to notice the issue.

At one point, I saw a doctor come over with some tweezers. They didn’t say anything about what was being done, presumably because they thought I’d freak out. One of them tilted my head and stuck the tweezers inside, then they pulled them out and showed us a dead roach. Dude, what the hell? I think they may have prescribed some meds just in case, and everyone got a bit of a kick out of the situation. Everyone except me—I legit had a dead roach in my ear! Thank goodness it died and didn’t crawl in deeper! I remember reading that roaches can’t crawl backward, so it sort of makes sense the damn thing got stuck, but damn, that’s scary!

In any case, do you have a persistent earache? Don’t ignore it; it could be a damn roach just kicking it inside your head! LOL.